TiaraMeSue - New Name, Same Me

Introducing “Tiara Me Sue” – my new blogging name!

Technically, it’s more of a re-introduction; I used the name almost 5 years ago as a blog title (link – here).

I can’t take credit for the name, it was given to me by a friend with permission to use – but it is clever, and it does fit.

It fits more than I realized, too; hence this change.

The backstory, my history with tiaras, can be found in that blog (click here), but I’ve realized since then that there is more to it.

As a writer, I know what it’s like to try to build an audience, a fan base, even a platform. My blog for the most part has been a haphazard combination of strong opinions, silly observations, and a lot of self-indulgence. Outside of saying I did it to humor myself, I couldn’t really describe it succinctly. My audience (if you will) consisted of friends who also believed in humoring me (and I love them for it).

A little over a year ago I realized that I had to change the title from a “40-something Breck Girl” to something else, to accommodate my upcoming 50^th birthday. To send the 40-something Breck Girl off in style, I planned on making a book of those blogs as my closure and set myself to the task of re-reading them from the beginning. While reading through, I did see some similar patterns and themes despite the aforementioned self-indulgence (I really like to humor myself) – and some of those thoughts were even cohesive. Yay, me! That realization caused me to combine all of them and separate them into essays, and those will be put together in book form hopefully by the end of 2019.

Since I began my blog I’ve published two books on my own and another with a co-author. I’ve begun taking myself a little more seriously and invested a lot more time and focus on identifying myself as a writer first. It’s been fun, exciting, and frustrating as hell – and I’m loving every minute of it. I find that my late-realizations of things are funny – especially when I’ve written about something more than once and only ‘get it’ later on.

The tiara ‘thing’ is one of them.

We are supposed to be who we are, to be true to ourselves, and that ensures that the people who should be around us will be. Your vibe attracts your tribe, in a nutshell.

That applies to everything. The writer discovers that no matter how many formulas she tries to follow, when she follows herself first she writes better and gains a following. Yes, she will still have to promote and publicize at some point later, but the quality of her writing and her voice need to be established first so that when it comes time to promote she will be able to state clearly who she is to ensure that her words will be read by the people that actually care about what she has to say.

Nobody can please everyone, and to change or ‘tone down’ anything about yourself to avoid bothering anyone will only make you feel dissatisfied with everything. When you act, be, do, write (whatever), from that place of the genuine YOU the people who resonate with that are drawn to you and what you do.

I didn’t set out wearing tiaras or embracing my own ridiculousness as a means of gaining attention or finding a hook to identify myself by. When I started “acting out” (read: acting like myself), I was in my mid-20s and getting angry at a lot of things, including myself. At the time I was still writing in secret, after being brought up to understand that my ‘hobby’ – although cute – was a silly dream to aspire to, and I should work at becoming something more ‘responsible’ and reliable. I went from a childhood of being ridiculed by my father for my rose-colored glasses to a young adulthood of being called a ‘fucking cheerleader’ by my then significant other – and yes, the fact that I’m female did play a role in all of that. That was part of my existence, and I cannot remove it.

 I had already been feeling that I wasn’t ever being taken seriously, and in a sort of defiance began ‘giving people a reason not to since they weren’t going to anyway’. At that point I didn’t feel like I had anything to lose, and I was already angry with myself for not being me. I am a total optimist, and I will not ever accept a ‘reality’ that people try to force down my throat when I don’t believe in it deep down.  I will continue to voice my opinions, even if they disagree with yours. Some people call that confrontational and have told me that I like to argue, but they don’t (or don’t want to) see that I feel I have the right not to blindly agree with what I am told, and that if I am arguing it means that I care enough either about the person or subject discussed to fight for it.

While I hate to say this, I have to: I have never been accused of being confrontational or argumentative by a woman – and I have argued with plenty. They have never accused me of being bossy, ‘talking to them like a teacher’, or ‘arguing like a lawyer’. Only a woman would understand what it’s like to be shut down because she’s a woman.

 - I just spent 20 minutes in my head trying to describe that last part without saying “only a woman would understand”. I do not spend all of my time arguing the battle of the sexes -  and I certainly don’t want to, but it’s hard to leave it out when its pervasive quality seeps into everything and affects more than some people want to believe. Sexual harassment involves more than just forcing sexual attention on someone; there is another level, a base level of the socially-accepted birthright that men have been told they have that their might will always hold authority over the weaker sex – which was further perpetuated by an over-arcing, general feminine acceptance of that standard.  It is that base level of superiority that they use to shut a woman down, even in a non-sexual situation – and even when they are ignorant of using it.

But I digress.

I was being squelched – and I was allowing it. The funny thing was that those things about me that I was hiding, toning down, and ignoring kept persisting and fighting back - inside of me. The defiance I was feeling towards outward situations and people was now being directed at me, from me.

Then came the birthdays that felt like annual periods of self-recrimination and regret. That is where the tiaras started. I reached that point of “I am going to be me and I am going to celebrate it!”  If I was already miserable that I could never seem to be what others wanted me to be and unhappy with myself for what it cost me to try, then I had nothing to lose in trying to make at least one person happy: me. If all that stuff was in me, then it was there for a reason.

I started caring less and less about what people thought or expected of me. It started with wearing tiaras on my birthday. Then I gave myself permission to write without hiding it, and later even promoting it. Then, I allowed myself my beliefs and to live by them. I could play and be silly. I realized that no matter what I do, someone is going to think I’m ridiculous – and that’s quite all right. If I am happy, that is the only reality that matters.

Tiaras are not just for birthdays anymore. I wear them when I want to – it certainly makes an occasion out of doing dishes! I wear them when I write sometimes, too, to remind me to be me. I also heavily encourage people to wear them, at least on birthdays to celebrate themselves. I believe that every person should, in some way, no matter how small. My rose-colored glasses have never been clearer, and I have never been happier.

Now, nearly 25 years later, each year for my birthday I buy a tiara that says ‘Birthday Girl’, and each year I give it away to another girl who has a birthday right after mine. I never have to look for that person, either; she is just there when I’m done with it. What’s funny is that despite that practice of giving away every birthday tiara I bought, I have amassed a collection of them that I did not buy.

Without trying to make any kind of statement or attempting to imprint an idea and by trying only to be me, people have begun to identify the tiara with me. They resonate and connect with me with that part of themselves that feels the same way on some level. I became accepted and taken seriously more for being my ridiculous self than I was when I was following so-called rules of acceptance and hiding it. What’s even funnier is that being accepted does not matter to me anymore. It always finds you; but only when you’re not looking for it, and even when you don’t know what it is.

Don’t try. Be.

And wear a tiara (or something else that is silly). You’d be surprised at how good it makes you feel